In the first couple days of December 2025, I was under the weather. I took some hours off work due to fatigue, acid reflux, headache and occasional nausea. On Wednesday, Dec. 3, at 2 a.m. and again at 8 a.m., I vomited – something that I had done rarely (maybe two or three times) since I was a small child. I also experienced some muscle weakness and odd vision distortions. I took a day off and went to the local Essentia Health walk-in clinic, where I was nasally swabbed (for viruses) and had blood drawn for a metabolic panel, hereafter described as "labs." The walk-in doc called me later to say my blood calcium was way high, my creatinine (an indicator of kidney function) ditto, and I should get a ride – not drive myself ‐ to the emergency room forthwith. I did that.
In the ER at CHI St. Joseph's Health – the hospital in Park Rapids, Minn. – I spent several hours reclining on an uncomfortable gurney while docs and nurses bustled around me. They x-rayed my chest. They gave me an abdominal CT-scan. They probably drew more blood (I'm losing track now of how many donations I've made). Eventually they decided to admit me, and stuck me in a tiny room on the second floor of the hospital, where they started me on IV fluids and certain other meds, such as Protonix (an acid reducer), Zofran (for nausea), magnesium and potassium supplements and, later on, some laxatives to get my bowels moving. A couple times, I was given Lasix (a diuretic) because my hands and feet were swelling up. Good times.
I spent several days there, mostly peeing into a plastic urinal because the cramped room, the bedside tray table and the IV cart made it next to impossible for me to get to the toilet without wetting myself. Eventually I was moved to a bigger room, which resolved this issue. I grew used to a routine of nurses and techs popping in every few hours to test my blood sugar, draw blood for labs, jab me with an insulin pen (if needed), take my vitals, etc. I went from having almost no appetite – sometimes taking just a couple bites of a meal before clapping the lid over the dish and turning away – to, finally, cleaning the plate and even (on my last night inpatient) asking for a late-night snack. I took increasingly long walks in the corridors as I gained strength. I received a pastoral visit and communion in my hospital room.
A doctor came by once or twice a day to advise me of what condition my condition was in. Apparently my calcium, which shouldn't go higher than about 1.2 and could be doing serious damage above 1.5, was around 3.5 when I showed up, and it climbed to 5.0 and finally to 5.7 before plateauing and starting to come down. Meanwhile my creatinine was also concerningly high, maybe (I later learned, during a follow-up with a specialist) to the point where kidney failure was imminent. But this also started to come down. The hospital doc was of the opinion that a drug I was on for blood pressure was promoting this hypercalcemia, so he changed my prescription. He also advised me to stop chewing Tums, which I had been taking heavily during that horrendous bout with acid reflux (which, I take it, is a symptom of hypercalcemia, so we have a chicken-egg problem there). And with my numbers starting to dial back in the right direction, the hospital let me go, scheduling me for follow-up labs (combined with my regular, semiannual labs to monitor my diabetes and other issues) and a consult with my primary care doc the following week.
Well, I had the labs drawn at my primary care clinic (Sanford in Park Rapids, making a clean sweep of all three health care systems in town). The night before my scheduled appointment there, my nurse practitioner called to voice grave concern about my kidney numbers (including BUN and eGFR) as well as my calcium levels, among other numbers that were all over the place and whose ups and downs on my routine labs had never quite made sense. And now, she observed, something seemed to be pulling calcium out of my bones. She proposed that I was either looking at hyperparathyroidism – a gland condition that could explain pretty much all the symptoms I'd had before going into the hospital – or maybe some kind of cancer. And my kidneys were angry, too. She advised me to hydrate like my life depended on it, and to follow the orders of the physicians assistant who would be seeing me the following day in her absence.
Well, the P.A. told me to stop taking metformin for my diabetes (because it's hard on the kidneys), referred me to an endocrinologist (gland doctor) and a nephrologist (kidney doctor), and then told me to go straight to the Sanford emergency room in Bemidji, which I did. Apparently the P.A. thought Sanford was going to admit me, but they didn't. They drew blood for more labs. The ER doc told me my calcium was actually low and gave me a calcium supplement, and they sent me home with a sheaf of instructions, including symptoms of hypo- and hypercalcemia to watch for.
None of this advice did favors for my ability to sleep at night. I was a nervous wreck. It seemed like my blood chemistry could pull any trick on me at any time, on no notice whatsoever, and every twinge or pang or tingle could be a sign of something that could put me back in the hospital. I was really scared.
As December progressed, I went back to Bemidji to see the nephrologist, with another round of labs being drawn the day before so he could discuss them with me. The nephrologist told me about a phenomenon he called the parathyroid-kidney axis, where a parathyroid gland goes haywire and starts pulling calcium from the bones while instructing the kidneys to leave it be in the blood, rather than filtering and peeing it out. He noted that my kidney numbers were moving back toward the normal range with each round of labs, and my calcium was currently in the normal range, so he scheduled me for a six-week follow-up and sent me on my way. He also advised me that in all likelihood, having one of my parathyroid glands cut out would set everything right again – pending advice from an endocrinologist. He also let me go back on a very low dose of metformin, meaning my diabetes isn't going entirely untreated.
Somewhere in this period, an ear-nose-and-throat doc's office at Sanford in Fargo set me up for a CAT scan and consult there, which was scheduled for Jan. 22 – this week, as I write this.
At the very end of December, I had (by the way) a medical eye exam in Wadena, an annual thing due to my diabetes. The news wasn't too bad, other than a concern about high ocular pressure. Then I saw the endocrinologist in Bemidji. He was the one who told me how close my calcium spike had brought me to kidney failure (thanks, dude). He also ordered some tests – a nuclear medicine scan of my thyroid area and kidney ultrasounds, followed by more labs – and cheered me up with the choice of three scenarios based on the results: (1) Everything looks normal (unlikely) and so no action needs to be taken. (2) A hyperactive parathyroid pops out in the scans (likely) and, by the way, I probably also have kidney stones; in which case he would refer me to an endocrine surgeon at the Mayo Clinic to have the bad gland removed. (3) The calcium spike is back (possible) and if so, I should go back to the hospital and have them do to me what they did before.
I slept on this advice until last week, when I went back to Bemidji for the tests the endocrinologist had ordered. I won't go into a lot of detail for now but I will mention that I had a rare, radioactive element – Technetium 99 – injected intravenously, then I had to lie very still while a huge camera took very long exposures of me. The second of two photo shoots that day, lasting about an hour, featured a 30-minute-plus scan in which the camera rotated 360 degrees around me, very slowly, followed by the same three stills (about 7 minutes each) they had taken earlier, meaning I could, and did, actually listen to all of Beethoven's 9th Symphony during the time I lay in that uncomfortable, claustrophobic machine. And then I got quickie ultrasounds of my kidneys and bladder and was sent home.
The results came in and were as encouraging as they could be, given the technical jargon they came packed in. The impression of my kidneys and bladder was described as "grossly unremarkable," which I chose to take as a compliment. The nuclear imaging didn't see any signs of hyperactivity, either. And in the labs drawn last Thursday, all my numbers were (at last) in the normal range, except sodium and chlorides being just a bit low and sugars (sigh) rather high. I actually took enough courage from these results to text the ENT doc in Fargo and ask if it's really necessary for me to have a CT this week and see him afterward; and to his credit, he canceled those appointments.
So, with a sense that, aside from not really knowing why all my innards went haywire last month, everything was settling back into normalcy, I sat down on the couch this past Friday night to enjoy a Saturday Night Live sketch on YouTube. And that's when I became suddenly and violently ill.
I mean, I went from feeling totally fine to being so dizzy and lightheaded that I could only sit up with difficulty. I found myself bathed in sweat. I thought I was going to lose consciousness. I had difficulty switching from YouTube to the dialer on my phone so I could call my friend (the one who drove me to the hospital last month) and have her come over. I had to support myself on the walls and furniture to get across the room, and down the hall, to put on shoes, sweatpants and a coat. By the time my friend arrived, I was barfing heartily into the kitchen sink. It took me quite a while to reach a point where I could stand up and take a few steps without either staggering or having to puke again. I finally pulled myself together enough to accept a ride to the ER.
The nurses and doctor at the CHI emergency room were nice. They tested me for the flu and other viruses that are going around these days; the results were negative. The ER doc explained something about vasovagal syncope, a fainting spell caused by a reflex that slows the heart and lowers blood pressure due to some kind of trigger, perhaps something I ate that disagreed with me. The sweats and vomiting are part of the package. The doc reassured me that so soon after my labs came back normal, I probably wasn't experiencing blood-chemistry wackiness. And since I was no longer sweaty, dizzy or nauseous, he sent me home.
It was spooky. It was discouraging for this to happen, so soon after everything seemed back to normal after my previous illness, which had also peaked with a barfing jag. I felt a bit of self-pity, like "I thought I was over all this, now ..." But it wasn't unprecedented. I said I had rarely puked in my adult life before last month, but the previous time was pretty much exactly like what happened on Friday night. After a meal at my parents' house, I came over all pale and sweaty, had a dizzy spell, ran to the bathroom and yakked, and felt much better afterward. I suspected then, as the ER doc suggested Friday night, that I may have eaten something that my body rejected. The first instance has made me leery of venison-based entrees; the latest installment might give me pause the next time I'm considering ordering Szechuan shrimp. I definitely threw out the leftovers from that night's dinner, I'll tell you.
UPDATE: Minutes after first publishing this, the endocrinologist's office called me and told me to go straight to the ER to have my low sodium level evaluated and if necessary corrected with IV fluids. The local ER personnel reran my labs but didn't think any urgent treatment was needed, so they let me go. Hmph, so much for saving money (for example, by not having that unnecessary CT scan).
All this medical melodrama has taken a lot out of me. I've lost a lot of time at work; my PTO bank is pretty much dried up. I haven't gotten a lot of the projects done that I meant to work on at home. A week without having blood drawn or having to travel to a doctor's appointment has become a rare treat. I can hardly entertain the idea of traveling any great distance for any length of time (like, a week's vacation to visit my folks, now living in another state – which was what I had planned for the five days I spent in the hospital last month). And if you want me to tie it all up in a bow, I've realized that every day of life, every day of full strength and free activity, every night in the comfort of my own home, is a gift.
ART: A nuclear imaging "ironing board," like the one I lay on for a good hour-and-a-half last week, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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